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My current Setup (2023)

Setup
Julian Beaujardin
Julian Beaujardin February 17th, 2023

After each screen share, I'm often asked what IDE, font, color scheme, or setting I'm using. Here is a general summary of it.

Lets's start with the hardware!

Hardware

Here's the hardware on my black Height Adjustable Electric Standing up Desk.

I use a MacStudio with an Apple M1 ultra with 20-core CPU, 64-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine and 128GB unified memory.

Yeap! It's a beast!

MacStudio

IDE

I mostly code in PHP, version 8.2 since a few months ago, and use VSCode as IDE. VSCode is my editor of choice because As Caleb Porzio said: "IDEs do too much, and text editors like Sublime Text do too little", so VSCode perfectly occupies the space between them.

Here's a screenshot of it:

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I'm using Palenight Theme (a dark based theme). I like a dark based theme because it keeps me focused on the code I write, without any other distraction. However, It's true that as Freek said: "in some circles this is maybe a bit controversial". The settings, keybindings and a few extensions I use, were beautifully handcrafted by Caleb Porzio. You definitely have to buy his course: How to make VS Code Awesome

The font I used is "MonoLisa". It costs $89 but is worth it. You can get it here.

The Font size is 15 and line height 1.6

As you can see in the screenshot above, I've hidden a lot of things from the UI of VSCode. I like to keep it minimal and I can't tell you exactly why, but since then (a few years ago) I feel I am insaly productive!

Mostly I work with the entire Laravel ecosystem by using the stack known as: TALL and always always try to be sticked to my own rule: "you can't have a single line of javascript your modern laravel apps"

One of my favourite VS Code extensions is the "Simple Project Switcher" made by Caleb Porzio, which allows me to switch between projects very easy. It's free, so definitely get it.

MacOS

These are the most common apps I use:

  • To run projects locally (in the browser) I use Laravel Valet.
  • To supervise PHP and switch between different PHP versions I use: PHP Monitor
  • To connect to S3 and sftp servers I use Transmit.
  • Sometimes I need to run an arbitrary piece of PHP code. Tinkerwell is an excellent app to do just that.
  • Insomnia is an amazing app to perform API calls. I used POSTMAN before (for years), but felt a bit heavy, so nah!
  • Databases are managed with TablePlus
  • My favourite cloud storage solution is Dropbox. All my personal documents are on there ;)
  • My backups are handled by Time Machine. It just works!
  • Tweets were tweeted with Tweetbot. However, On January 12th, 2023, without warning, Elon Musk ordered his employees at Twitter to suspend access to 3rd party clients which instantly locked the Tweetbot App. so now, I use the regular IOS twitter app.
  • My browser of choice is Safari, because of its speed and low power use.
  • To create videos I use Final Cut Pro.
  • High level planning is done using Online App Diagrams
  • All servers I work on are provisioned by Forge and hosted by Amazon AWS and Digital Ocean

iOS

My current phone is an iPhone 12 Pro Max with 128 GB of storage.

Here's a screenshot of my current homescreen.

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I don't use folders and try to keep the number of installed apps to a minimum. There's also just two screens with apps, all the other apps are opened via search. Most of my time is spent in Safari, Twitter, Mail, and Quickbooks. Notifications and notification badges are turned off for all apps except Messages.